London-based Proximie, a healthtech platform that enables surgeons to virtually attend operating theatres to guide complex surgeries, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $80M (approximately €76.3M) in a Series C round of funding.
With this round, the company has now raised a total of $130M in funding to date.
The investment follows a year in which Proximie witnessed a significant increase in its Total Contracted Value, supported over 13,000 surgeries, and expanded its global footprint to 100 countries.
Investors in this round
The round was led by Advent Life Sciences, a leading trans-Atlantic venture investor building innovative life sciences businesses. The firm invests in early and mid-stage life sciences companies that have a “first or best-in-class” approach to unmet medical needs. Advent Life Sciences has a presence in the UK, the US, and France.
The round also saw participation from new investors Emerson Collective – an impact investor founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, British Patient Capital, Mubadala Investment Company, and the Minderoo Foundation.
John Cassidy, Investment Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers, says, “The pandemic has rapidly accelerated the adoption of virtual clinical care globally. Proximie’s technology platform combines AI, machine learning, and augmented reality to facilitate live sharing of the operating room, creating a connected surgical care ecosystem to better support patients and hospitals. We are pleased to partner with Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram and the Proximie team to support their mission of saving lives by sharing the world’s best clinical practices.”
Existing investors F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads, Questa Capital, Global Ventures, and Maverick Ventures also joined the round.
“We save lives by sharing the world’s best clinical practice”
In late 2016, Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram FRCS (Plast), BEM, drew on her surgical experiences and her passion for innovation and education, to create Proximie.
Proximie is a tool that allows surgeons to virtually “scrub in” to any operating room in the world, extending the capabilities of top surgeons to areas without access to top surgical care.
Dr Hachach-Haram says, “I wanted to create a platform that could extend the reach of a surgeon’s expertise, and make that skill timeless. A multi-sensory experience that was a catalyst for collaboration, and that could eventually digitise a surgeon’s footprint. We wanted to create the effect of a borderless operating room that could empower surgeons to remotely share knowledge that could ultimately reduce variation in care, and help save lives.”
About Proximie
Proximie is a global healthtech platform that is focused on digitising operating and diagnostic rooms. Proximie’s aim is to deliver a connected surgical platform to help provide quality surgical care around the globe. Every Proximie procedure can be recorded, analysed and leveraged for future use to help inform best practice.
By connecting operating rooms globally, Proximie claims to be facilitating a rich, insightful data set that feeds best practices into the entire healthcare ecosystem. The platform has already conducted tens of thousands of surgical procedures and has been deployed in over 500 hospitals across 100 countries in five continents.
Proximie has contracts with over 35 major medical device companies with access to 90 per cent of operating rooms and diagnostic suites in the UK, the US, and EU. It has been published in over 20 medical journals.
Hospitals have applied Proximie’s technology to drive efficiencies in the surgical backlog following COVID-19, increased the speed of training surgeons while maintaining costs, and built hub and spoke models concentrating surgical care and expertise in central locations to reduce the time and costs associated with travel.
Founder Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram says, “Our vision is to democratise surgery through better data by connecting every OR and Cath Lab in the world. We began this journey by enabling surgeons to virtually join any OR. Now, we’re using this capability to digitise the operating room, bringing patients the collective expertise of the best surgeons in the world – where data collected and shared on Proximie can help them receive life-saving care, no matter where they live.”
Capital utilisation
Proximie says that the proceeds will be used to accelerate the development of key products and services, build out Proximie’s marketplace ecosystem, and scale their Operating System of the OR – a centralised platform delivering connected surgical care.
Hospitals and surgical centres using Proximie’s technology will have access to preoperative data that can help inform patient care, real-time collaborative tools to record, train, and deliver care, and postoperative content management tools to capture and distribute content to their colleagues.
Proximie claims it will enable health systems to create an intelligent, digital layer in the OR, allowing them to save time, money, and lives.
